Fixes from the Pyxis: The Besting of the Badasses
by Quillon42
Summary: Tournament-Style matchups between characters good and evil from The Walking Dead TV show against both alignments from Clive Barker's video game Jericho. Those spawned by a famed storyteller of the undead, as they meet those sired by the infamous scribe of the Undying, will learn a hard lesson in all of this: No one is above the loss. Will end up as five or six installments here.
1. Chapter 1

FIXES FROM THE PYXIS: THE BESTING OF THE BADASSES

By Quillon42

CHAPTER ONE

SOMEWHERE IN ATLANTA

Within an instant of the discorporate Captain's order to the others in his company of conjurer- combatants to "head for the water and swim deep," those adventurers of the occult called the Jericho Squad—those remaining, anyway, after nearly half of them had been seemingly slaughtered in the course of their cruel, centuries-spanning crusade—the slick soldiers had slipped miserably through quavering currents, out of a grotto once occupied by an adversary almost older than time itself.

Where these soldiers of the supernatural were now headed, as they surfaced to what appeared to be an endless ocean overtured by an eerie, ceaseless Kyrie Eleison…even the team's recently-deceased chronomancer, were she still here with the rest of the Squad, even she couldn't be able to calculate, be it temporally or spatially, where in the Dark-Rapture-dastard flying fuck they were.

What the troopers of the transmundane did soon know, a few antediluvian wavelets later, was that there was that same, five-times-familiar feeling that they underwent when they have ripped through an interdimensional rift on this latest mission, one which they had regularly felt full-on-frontal to the torso…though this time the transcendental tingling was issuing from underfoot, even now as they tried so desperately to tread water in the primordial stew into which these witches of warriors were all so tumultuously thrown.

[SWASH SWASH SWASH SWASH SWASH SWASH SWASH SWASH SWASH SWASH SWASH SWASH SWASH SWASH SWASH SWASH SWASH SWASH SWASH SWASH SWASH SWASH]

Many mind-muddling minutes and a single final traumatic timerift thereafter, and the heretical heroes discovered themselves dragging one another out of a ditch that was rather damp, a dank drainage at the edge of a downtown unknown to all but one of their number. The gothically-garbed guerrillas all looked one to the other, each frazzled as per usual following an exodus from one era to that preceding…

…yet at the same time, each found himself or herself pleased to peer upon the piceous apparel of not three other generation-jumping Jerichos…but six once more.

Indeed, now the epoch-encircling battles were joined once again, such that it was not just the surly sniperess, the arsenal-cum-arsonist asshole, the belle of blade and blood, and the philandering priest who were living refugees of Al-Khali. Nay, the freakish foursome were now met once more by the taciturn astral projector, that corporal who was a most obsessive compulsive human calculator…

…and, once more among their ranks of the incessantly-respawning…their Captain and Squad Leader, the Jumbo Jericho in the flesh with them all, inexplicably anew.

A pleasant spell was spent between the seven now, they all allowing themselves laughs and embraces for a stint, each permitting himself or herself an indulging in emotion for a moment without wondering how the three who were taken from them were enlisted back into their most rancorous of ranks.

Then the snazzy, sable-swathed septet caught sight of a motley menagerie of mofos, with one decked in dreadlocks and the keenest of katanas…another with a wicked-kicking crossbow…yet another with a revolver glinting from his waistband, as if his pelvis had grown and boasted the most metallic of phalluses.

Hovering before the disparate drove of survivors was an all-too-familiar infant, a shadowy toddler whom the time-traversing rangers recognized as a child who catalyzed the decimation of humanity wherever he went. For certain, he would have to be stopped one more time.

Amidst the squad, the most licentious of clerics pointed to the people the murderous moppet was now addressing. "Are they Jerichos as well?"

Of them all, the OCD calculatress was able to respond accurately, as the miniature multiverse's motherboard upon her wrist had just now dictated to her where and when the warriors all were. Before she could do so, however, the most pyromaniac of all pricks ever, among them:

"No…they're just jerkoffs."

RICK GRIMES VERSUS DEVIN ROSS

The predicament progressed thusly now: that little yet lethal blotch of a boy had broken it all down to the other gregarious group, who as millions of voracious viewers in the reader's realm had been ad hoc guardians of an apocalypse-vomited-upon Georgia. According to the Satannic scion, the interloping soldiers were to blame for all the incidences involving the afterdeceased—and if they were now routed, in at least a best-out-of-thirteen tournament, then the pestilence of the putrefied persons upon their land would be undone. As such, those survivors now set out to send the Jerichos into boxes that would be more pine in nature than Pyxis.

First up regarding these baneful confrontations was the respective showrunner of each of the sides. Deputy Rick doddered on up with his Resident Evil 1-Refugee Colt Python (it's really the kind he uses—look it up), while Ross palmed his Patrioteer assault rifle. The two toed up in downtown Atlanta, not far from where the eons-spanning Squad had alighted in this reality…not far at all from where Grimes's trusty steed had been downed and devoured, in his initial and lonely first of chronicles concerning the pusillanimous postcroaked.

According to the puntworthy pubescent who prompted this series, rules were ratcheted into place to make matters a bit fairer. One of the most salient was that Barker's bitches and bastards could only use one of their conventional weapons, as most of the wretched from the Ricktatorship only brandished a single signature arm themselves. Second, there was to be no "jacking in" of munitions or of health aids by any of the paranormal personnel involved. Third, defeat was only arrived upon by death of a combatant…but the dispatched one would be revived by a member of the visiting team immediately thereafter.

( _So that there can be as complete an audience as possible to witness and withstand my assimilation of this world,_ thought the terrifying tyke to himself).

Interestingly, the adolescent-seeming emcee said nothing about whether the Jerichos could employ their assorted psychic abilities—perhaps a bit of wild card chaos to be thrown into the mixture, thought the Squad Captain as he prepared to engage the haughty hick of an opponent he faced now.

Mostly the confrontation was a blend of bullets and wry whining about whose cause was worthier, whose people were more important, whom the world needed more than anyone else now. Rick dove and ducked through various alleyways through which he had gallivanted before, his enemy's weapon more powerful but his own familiarity with the environment giving him a distinct advantage. Each of the intrepid leaders sustained his fair share of fire from the other, with Rick railing against shots entered into his side and lower leg, while Ross was racked by wounds to the back and the shoulder. Eventually both men were about spent, in terms of energy and ammunition.

Devin was totally dry, in fact…but Rick still had a shot left in the chamber. And the soldier was now laid up dead to rights, as the sheriff lined him up for a catastrophic killshot, all in the alleyway in which Glenn Rhee first caught sight of the cop. It was just as Rick lifted his powerful Python to purge Ross from this putrid planet, in fact…

…that the jaunty Jericho allowed his consciousness to abscond, it sprinting toward, then springing into the ghouls-beset gendarme of Georgia.

Rick then realized that his canny Colt was arcing toward the insides of his mouth, rather than the innards of his opponent…and that there was nothing he could do to halt it from happening.

[BLAAAMMMMM]

As the plague-weary hero hunkered to the gritty ground now, he headed towards a miserable yet very momentary expiration, he swore he could see and hear the presences of people very close to him, from earlier seasons of his existence.

"You don't gotta worry none about Lori bein' lonely down here…she's as much mine as she was 'fore you came to the camp, at the beginnin' a' all this."

In the beady-eyed boor's arms, the auburn-tressed and ghostly-white-gowned lady sneered at Rick, as the man then noticed a certain kind of cord winding toward his throat.

"For so many weeks in that prison you kept me on the line, Rick," chided the warrior's once-wife, now divorced from him by death. He flinched as the chrome coil from the telephone Lori toted came all the closer.

"Then you stopped answering me. Why was that? You go off now and…chase every skirt and…sword maiden you can now?

"Even in these few instants…before you're brought back, of course, as goodness knows how much the world so needs Rick Grimes…you'll know what it felt like, what I went through in my final throes."

The phone line bit tightly into the man's neck now, harder than any knife held against his jugular by any Hilltop heavy.

"You should never have left that Andrew asshole to his own devices in the pen courtyard, baby…wouldn't have set off the whole, dad-blamed…chain of events that caused me to check out early."

Rick knew the events to which Lori had been referring, which millions of scifi fans had witnessed in the "Killer Within" episode—back well before the show had sprung over the shark, in this author's estimation.

"Here…the party line I'm linking up to you now…it'll extend the connection between us…so that the actual seconds you're out will feel like weeks…as you watch old Shane and I show you how to make a baby…

"…a little bundle just like the Judith that Officer Walsh and I conceived, back in the city limits of Atlanta."

So did Deputy Grimes now endure a pain far more unfathomable than death itself, in the aftermath of his defeat.

VICTOR: DEVIN ROSS

TO BE CONTINUED


	2. Chapter 2

FIXES FROM THE PYXIS: THE BESTING OF THE BADASSES

By Quillon42

CHAPTER TWO

ROSITA ESPINOSA VERSUS FRANK DELGADO

Deep within a subbasement of the storage facility utilized in the second Walking webisode, the most energetic of the "Ostensible Scientist Escort To Washington DC" trio nursed an ankle grazed by Gatling. On one hand, Rosita felt a bit of comfort that, as skilled as her unctuous oversized enemy might have been with his enormous generator of leaden diarrhea, he was going to run out of the shit sooner rather than later, the rate his weapon was rambling.

She'd never be able to tell, though, how many rounds he'd have left when she'd finally have to face him down. Kind of hard to do that _Dirty-Harry_ -climax chamber counting when the other guy had a belt-fed weapon capable of firing off hundreds of rounds per minute.

[WHIRRRRRR RATTA TATTA TATTA TATTA TATTA TATTA TATTA TATTA TATTA TATTA]

The overwhelming issuance of so much automatic ammunition peppered the walls all around where the lady lay, all upon the floor of the chamber in which she was contained.

 _Fucker's going for scorched earth tactics, and he against only just one opponent._

Oh, Rosita…if only you knew how scorching this wacky pyromaniac, freshly crazy out of the Pyxis, could make things.

But, as matters would have it…the comely commando would be able to meet her assailant with a response that would prove a polar opposite in more ways than one.

It would be about another fifty seconds before Frank would force the door, his overly imposing frame now skulking towards his slender enemy, the ogre of an hombre coming on with his Gatling Gun as thuggishly in figure and gait like one of the endless evil iterations of Oleg in Saints Row the Third.

"You gonna keep leadin' me on and draggin' this out, Mami?" Delgado trained the lengthy barrel of his rapid-fire wreckage wreaker upon Rosita.

"I gots to get back to Billie so's I can make her bleed…with my _other_ Gatling…"

The beset belle measured the moronolith before her, she tensing, waiting for the moment as the latter looked her up and down devouringly.

"Now I know you've got that bit of ordnance on you…won't do your guapa concha no good against a modern-day wizard like myself."

Rosita whipped out the DefTech 37mm Rotary Launcher before her now, she figuring she had nothing to hide, literally, since this fuck Frank here somehow knew she'd found it down in this basement…

"Like, so what do you have in there, incendiaries? Won't do nothin' against someone imbued with _Ababinili_ …"

And then, finally after so much blustery blather, time was up.

[WHIRRRRRR]

The sound Rosita had been raring for finally reported. She dove out of the way of the gunfire following, letting loose with her own cannon as she flew.

Frank then felt, gelidly from gut to Gatling, what he never foresaw as the liquid nitrogen freeze shell struck home straight against his chest. Instinctively he summoned the abovenamed italicized exotic entity, whose fiery essence could smother any mother, stat. Even this was extinguished in the wake of the stupefying sciencing initiated by Espinosa between episodes of her show, in her spare time.

Now that her fuckwad of a foe's bravado was ever so coldly curtailed, Rosita could easily explain the ice ace that was up her sleeve this whole time.

"Eugene laid the foundation, with his formulas for bullet manufacture." Freely she tossed her arms so her hands landed elfishly atop her scalp, she striking the same flirty, faux-vacant semi-voguing pose she did in her first full appearance in the fourth season.

The rotary launcher still perched between said voguing palms made the lady come off a mite bit less silly this time, though.

She stood a foot from her ice-writhing adversary now. "I took his recipe and decided that the dish could be served a bit more chilled, you know?

"I could make an alliterative stereotypical reference, like…call these babies projectile _piraguas_ or some shit, but the author's not that much of a honky simpleton.

"Anyway…"

Rosita started to raise(ita) the Rotary once more, but this time not to fire.

[SMMMMMAAASSSSSHHHHHH]

…

…

As Rosita pored over the assorted fragments of Frank on the floor now:

"Unlike what I heard your squadmates saying regarding something you like to utter every now and then…for you this isn't just another day at the _office_ …but rather, a day _on ice_ instead."

Ugh, she thought to herself as she made her way out of the facility basement, it was a good thing neither Eugene nor Spencer was around to hear that one.

…

(But certainly all the worse…"raiseita"…maybe this author really _is_ that kind of honky after all).

VICTOR: ROSITA ESPINOSA

OFFICER DAWN LERNER VERSUS FRAULEIN HANNE LICHTHAMMER

Everybody from interns to outpatients found themselves to be more than a mite scandalized upon witnessing a most necrotic Nazi nightmare in the midst of their hospital haven of Grady Memorial. The frightening sight of the unholy elitist evil here, more terrifying than any woeful walker that any infirmary inhabitant here had ever laid eyes upon, was almost as disgustingly repulsive, in fact…

…as the most distressing spectacle of the evil's opponent, that overbearing officer who once oversaw all the operations of the emergency institution with the steeliest of fists. To be sure, it was this pair of putrescent authoritative anathema now which was mixing it up while the medics all around made away from them as fast as they could so hastily mosey.

"I've heard tell that your reign here was one to be rued," spat Hanne most haltingly as she swiped at her American enemy with the nastiest of nails. Her officer adversary dodged quickly, her spartanly athletic torso arcing back to avoid the agony-uttering scratch. "You are one who was indeed dreaded by all…which, I must admit, commands my grudging respect."

Dawn did all she could to suppress a grin as she swung an arm forward now, she easily blocking another vicious strike from this miserable mistress of the Master Race. "Yeah, Frau Fuckpiece…respect is all that matters…the most of what little's left of what we got here now."

Lichthammer abruptly lunged at Lerner's midriff, and the latter brought up a knee spryly, the reaction still visiting pain upon the policewoman, yet her meniscus mitigating the damage that would have been dashed upon her intestines.

"Ze superior officer you exterminated…I was told his name was Hanson." A violent thrust of the Teutonic temptress's fingernails once more towards Dawn's temple, which caught the officer instead across the cheek, bringing a bloom of blood upon half of her face. "A name not very far removed from my own Christian one, in a sense…"

"Someone of your ilk dares to deem any aspect of you to be _Christian._ " This the cop-batant taunted, she not too cop in fact about the designation that the other dire damsel placed upon her perdition-permeated self, as she caught a flailing arm aimed her way and configured the limb most cruelly, so as to fracture it unfailingly.

[CRRRAAACCCCCCKKKKKK]

"Mmmfff… _Scheist…_

"You know, Frau Lerner," grunted the haughty Hanne as she continued to slash at the other sadistic sister with her still functional arm, "I am still in ze dark as to ze weapon you chose to bring to zis little hoedown of ze horror. No truncheon in tow for you? You are not packing ze standard issue Schmidt unt Wesson you officers are reported to have on you at all times?"

Dawn was done with this decomposed Dusseldouche. "You know, Gretel…I've heard tell that you were once blue-eyed, and blonde, and beautiful…of course, this was all ages ago and such for you…but not too traumatically long ago, I had a run-in with someone similar, at least in terms of her pukeworthy physicality.

"I'm going to do _you_ the way I wanted to do _her,_ so many, many times over."

An instant following, and Dawn darted with the weapon she went with—not any officially-issued

ordnance of an officer, mind you, but an item inspired by these environs she had run for so long.

Soon thereafter the shiny syringe was sticking sharply so deeply into the depression between the banal banshee's breasts. "And here's another offering for you, to match all the moves you made these past fifteen minutes."

So many shivering stabs from needles clutched tightly in both of the officer's palpitating palms. _"Do you really get it now, you blonde bimbo fuck?!"_

For all that she might have heard before the battle, Hanne would never have been party to the revelation of the whole petulant "I get it" that that biddy Beth Greene had told the lethal Lerner, before the former had buried a pair of scissors in the other's chest. But the lurid Lichty was certainly "getting it" now, ever so vindictively, from the punishing peacekeeper as Dawn drove the silver-nitrate-saturated syringes again and again into the undead overlady's frail frame.

Fraulein Hanne was now teetering at the edge of an oversized laundry chute, just as she was so similarly and precariously situated over the enormous arch from which she was taken down most trouncingly, then by a saucy psychic swordswoman whom the naughy Nazi dared to call Wilhelmina.

"Do you fucking GET IT?!"

Then one final stamp of the syringe upon the pusillanimous parchment of Lichthammer's pallid sternum as the force of the attack ejected her out and down, down the length of the utility chute.

More exasperated than exhausted despite her victory, Officer Lerner leered down the vertical passage, a shaft somewhat like the one that hayseed whore had sent O'Donnell screaming down. The furious fuzz lady was still so angry as all get-out, but this beatdown made things a bit better.

And hey, things could be worse for the woman, given that she was back now. She could once again have her reign over the place, and get more white male goons like the molesting Gorman; like the surly O'Donnell, for sure; and even like the duplicitous Doctor Edwards, who killed to keep his job. For certain, there would be other females of whatever color, and nonwhite males who would oppose her in this small sandbox, this originally-fifth-season hospital sequence of The Walking Dead forerunning _The Force Awakens_ in its sickening SJWness.

Because a story in which women and/or nonwhites are marginalized or otherwise made to look bad is called Sexist and Racist…yet a story in which white males are uniformly, unvaryingly made to look like assholes is called Social Justice.

VICTOR: OFFICER DAWN LERNER

DARYL DIXON VERSUS XAVIER JONES

In the still of a very stifling morning in the sticks of Hotlanta, a certain hayseed heartthrob worked his way through twigs and troughs surrounding another kind of still, one which he wasn't too stoked about revisiting.

This was the hickory haunt occupied by himself as well as that same blue blonde who was invoked and excoriated by the cop from the confrontation prior. Yes, Daryl and Beth were damnably blessed, in a sense, to have that time to themselves in that moonshine shack, to while away an evening reflecting on their piteous pasts as well as their present predicaments. It was so blisteringly bittersweet, as each of them had engaged soulfully with the other, also argued heatedly, ultimately emerged strongly and all the more fulfilled as the ravishing redneck became enriched through hearing of the tribulations of one of Herschel's dearest honeys, and vice versa.

But this affair now, here only an hour or so after a breakfast of badger balls and pig's toes…Mister Dixon didn't know if he was feeling up to it (even after such a sumptuous feast). Echoes of the encounter with Beth had made him edgier now, the Deep South downhomer on the defensive; the selection of this arena by his host couldn't possibly have been a coincidence.

[WHHHSSSSSHHHHH]

His crossbow was cocked and at the ready now, the hillbilly's hackles raised at the slightest stirring uttered by Nature at large in this most rustic theatre of reckoning.

He could scent out the spoor of just about any animal, as he'd done with squirrels and skunks he'd summoned from the brazen brush for so many suppers. The cocksure clodhopper could pick up from prints what might have went down between a couple of cusses, as he did while speculating in the second season, back on Beth's homestead, upon the wayward fate of the Shane-strangled Randall.

But here his target, of a tech much higher than any opossum he'd opposed before…for all of that enemy's overt onyx threads…Daryl just couldn't draw him out.

Straining in the peeling silence, the bucolic bumpkin did all he could to listen for his foe…while the same watched him, from a most unlikely, vulture-victuals vantage.

That mofo Merle's younger brother was actually making complete unwitting eye contact with his opponent right now, in a way, as Daryl peered deeply into the eyes of the walker he'd staked with a bolt so many months back…

…and his astrally-projecting adversary stared at Dixon in turn, measuring him through the same skin-eater's peepers, the enemy actually a measure of meters away and making ready for his assault.

Sleepwalkingly now, in a sense, was that extranatural exterminator Xavier, as he shimmied along stealthily, readying his shotgun to reduce the rube before him into so much cornfed compost.

Still resorting to the standpoint of the staked-up undead, Xavier watched through other eyes as his Peach-State prey made his way around the back of the nostalgia-hallowed hovel, it somehow having been revived (as if by the resurrection-energized hands of Ross or Rawlings) for the sake of this treacherous tourney.

It was at the rear of the rickety structure that the two tusslers would finally make actual contact, eye and otherwise. Captain Jones was so confident that he would be able to come upon his boorish, back-turned opponent undetected that he uttered a footfall that was more false than furtive…

[SSSSSSHHHHHHHHH]

and the one then whirled on the other instantaneously with quarrel ready to quell, while the other

[THHHEWWWWWW]

[BLAAAMMMMM]

had his shotgun already at the ready, it bellowing its blast to catch Daryl staggeringly from solar plexus to chest now, even as

"GHAAAAAGGGHHHHH!"

the eon-traipsing Xavier-executioner took a bolt badly to the upper front of his left leg.

Carefully the chronospanning cadet trundled over to the side of the small housing, as he took in the sight of the semi-figure now that was his quarrel-queefing quarry. The other looked a man who had been through several stages of the abyss, all in one epoch. It didn't take tripping through everyplace from Rule Britannia to Rome Imperial in order for him to earn his stripes of inter-settlement strife.

In any case, now, there was the needling of the noxious projectile protruding through Jones's thigh. For certain, the Captain knew, it would be hell for him to pull the ornery arrow out…but the heady healing abilities of his canny compatriots would make the treatment for it a treat...

…and for certain, the agony for the consciousness-jumping Jerichoan was naught, he was sure, compared to what he had undergone most devastatingly in the Pyxis…and compared to that sustained by his fellow dweller in this deceased-diseased thicket.

As the most taciturn of his troupe, Jones wasn't one usually for eulogy or elegy. But he had felt compelled now, at the worthiness of his woebegone foe.

"Far as trackers go, your instincts, under other circumstances, could outdo my astral.

"It's too bad this time that the hooch hit you so hard."

He then looked to the shoddy shanty, of which he was informed of the experiences of Daryl and Beth (just as he was educated on the exploits of all from Al-Khali to the Assyrians), and the soldier smh-ed somewhat sympathetically.

VICTOR: XAVIER JONES

TO BE CONTINUED


	3. Chapter 3

FIXES FROM THE PYXIS: THE BESTING OF THE BADASSES

By Quillon42

CHAPTER THREE

SASHA WILLIAMS VERSUS ABIGAIL BLACK

Merely crossing the Safe-Zone-bordering canyon, crammed to the brim with carnivorous Confederacy-descendants…merely the very _idea_ of doing so would be enough to inspire weaker walkers-to-be to embrace the same "opting out" enjoyed by Jacqui and her final-moments-in-existence acquaintance (a never-transgendering Jenner by the first name of Doctor Edwin) within the self-destructing CDC at the close of the first fledgling season of the program.

However, the tournament tangoers of this episode not only treaded amidst the breadth of this undeath valley…they threaded through it, again and again, each whacking so many walking wights with the back end of her sniper's special as she went. The tragically-taken-down Tyreese's willowy sister now waded through so many derrieres of the deceased as she endeavored to seek a shot with her custom AR-15 against her designated enemy.

A small wrinkle which rendered the matter a mite difficult for the Alexandrian gate guardian known as Sasha was the fact that said enemy had already emptied a couple of her special "ghost bullets"—destructive rounds guided specially by her opponent Abigail's telekinetic talents—and said psychically-pushed projectiles had found marks in Sasha's left ear and right elbow.

For certain, Lieutenant Black could have laid low her target virtually many gibbous moons and ghoulish moans ago—but Sasha was somewhat comely to the snippy sniperess, almost even to rival Simone's sleek looks, such that Abby decided that she would play with her prey for a spell before she decided on a cue for the killshot. As such, the lurid lesbianic legionnaire of the ages picked her shots at leisure, she even enjoying certain instants in which she lost sight of her graceful game, the tease titillating the leathered lady to no end.

Indeed, Sasha sought all the cadaverous cover that she could, she doing all she could to capitalize on the advantage of environmental familiarity and experience in furtiveness that she could possibly muster. Verily, her frowny foe had been out of practice with stealth, as Abigail had hobnobbed with her other heretics in squad formation for a while now, out in the open mostly on battlefields spanning centuries, and not so much in smothering wilderness as had those in the Atlanta-absconding entourage.

Despite her diving between so many rocks and revenants, Sasha was sure that at any second her attitudinous adversary would open fire once more with her own custom US XM-110 and take her down to the depths of the damned-dwelling ditch in which she hid now. All of the despair involved with this impending sense of slaughter, the idea that she would be at least momentarily reunited with the truculent Tyreese and her babe of a beau Bob—yet she accessing this only after going out in the most noggin-gibbingly-graphic way imaginable—the thought of expiring in such an unpalatable manner made the lady gird herself and gather to her feet once more.

Forsooth, the frazzled frau thought of all the insanity she had endured over time…she, as stated, having lost a sibling and a sweetheart in the stretch of one season…she having trusted a pathetic hospital cop, with she turning his back on him only for the man-maggot to knock her out at the first opportunity…she having undergone the most gag-inducing of galas during one of her first nights in Alexandria, as she experienced that torment of cordiality and realized that she preferred existence at the margin of human civilization, rather than suffocation at the center of Life Among Them (which was also the name of TWD Volume 12, and in this author's estimation the only volume title with any intriguing weight to it, much moreso than the clichéd corniness of "All Out War" and "No Turning Back," or the maudlin madness of "This Sorrowful Life" or "Here We Remain").

As all of this stifling stimuli built up within Sasha, she looked out amongst the expanse of the ex-living, and she noted for probably the fifth time that certain clutches of rubble were moving in a most unnatural manner. She'd never seen anything like this in the apocalypse, and she was certain that the walkers were not able to affect the environment to such an extent. It was almost as if the rattling rocks were being…manipulated by some otherworldly force…

And then Sasha got it. Taking aim abruptly, ignoring the agony in her ghost-pellet-gouged right elbow as she did so, she fired several times now toward the shifting stones. Yea, Abraham Ford's very own enchantress, that Rosita-relationship-wrecker let all the anger flow through her as she fired, she allowing the anxiety of the undead armageddon at large, the specific insanity earned from Alexandrian social outings, the particular frustration of fallen family and friends flow through her as she vocalized her angsting outburst against all of this again and again through her AR-15.

[BLAMMM BLAMMM BLAMMM BLAMMM BLAMMM BLAMMM BLAMMM BLAMMM BLAMMM]

What did the other dame in ultimately was indeed a series of shells in between the piceous pigtails at her temples, Abigail gawking out into the arid air as she underwent her umpteenth-trillionth expiration since Al-Khali. In her unassuming overconfidence, Lieutenant Black surmised that her subtle terra firma tremblings would escape the eye of her enemy…but Alexandria's premier sista shooter was much more focused and fixated than the other femme could fathom.

VICTOR: SASHA WILLIAMS

MICHONNE VERSUS BILLIE CHURCH

While the dynamic of the prior, sniper scuffle involved trading bulleted blows over the most protracted of distances in a given wo-mano-a-wo-mano competition, the blade-based clash involved instantly was kissingly close.

Bathed in blood now was each babe here in the bowels of what were once the dungeons of the goon-gregarious ghoul known as the Governor. While the Woodbury-worn wanderer felt a bit embattled amidst this glut of gore…her opponent was only in her natural element in this deluge of carnage.

In fact, it was with each cut that the preternatural point lady Billie had bought another bit of an edge over her enemy, given the ages-journeying jezebel's passion for sanguimancy. The best part was that saturnine-samurai-to-the-bone Michonne wasn't even cognizant of that blood magic was her foe's forte.

Now in the midst of the earthen-crust-carved cell the survivor stabbed while the soldier parried, the Georgian slashed and…the Jerichoan took yet another slice into her side. When Philip Blake's most maligned malcontent had noted a smirk instead of a sneer upon the mien of the other, she blinked in abject disbelief.

"You seem pretty confident with that nodachi," muttered the Chonner, she referring to her opponent's weapon as she raised her own katana to meet it. "Granted, it's longer than mine…mmfff…but nothing stronger."

(And then ever so graciously did this author avoid yet another Sir Mix-A-Lot reference in a Walking Dead story (See the Nixing of Nicholas)…although he must put in that here Michonne and Billie were more than "bound to get the friction on," between their blades here (so maybe it wasn't avoided after all)).

"Nahhh," spat the chirpy Church, most sarcastically as she shivered her rival off with a robust shunt of her sword, "I could skewer you with a piddling fucking tanto if I want to.

"This Pyxis-sticker here's just been a part of me for so long…been a beau to me much longer than that fuckstick Frank, in my squad, 's been."

"I feel you," said Billie's brazen conversant and competitor as Michonne thought that she too had been much more connected to her own knife so kawaii than to any derpy deputy from King County. She gritted anew as she made forward with another endeavor, this time she scoring a small weal above her antagonist's right breast.

Again, though…unlike the typical display of disdain showcased on the face of the mopey muffproof terminatrix that was Michonne herself…or the visage of vulnerability presented by the much more relatable Sasha (more relatable in this author's opinion, anyway)…Billie blanched not at all at the sensation of being scratched once more by the Alexandrian champion's giant ginsu. In fact, it almost looked as if there were an expression of some kind of masochistic satisfaction on the Sergeant's face, upon her sustaining so many lethal lacerations.

And so intently attentive to the eyes of her opposition was TV Andrea's surly soulmate that she never noticed all the glowing globes of garnet, the orbs of oxblood that erupted about her, and which flowed out of the wounds of the other woman.

Too late it was now, in fact, that the katana-brandishing kicker of asses realized that the circles of cerise surrounding her at three points were lashing into her with tepid tendrils, rooting the roustabout to the place where she stood, immobilizing her but quick.

"Like I teased ya about the tanto a second ago, McChonald's," began the cheeky cadet, she pronouncing (her bastardization of) Michonne's name here incorrectly with a soft "O"—just as, to be fair, effing Chris Hardwicke himself did during the segment of Talking Dead following the last episode of Season Two—but anyways, "I don't need big and loud whatsits to beat you…

"…but the Blood Wards really make this sport a spectacle."

With that, now, it was time for Billie to break in with her nodachi a bit more than she had these past several minutes of mince. Now it was a hack here

[SHHHUNNNKKK]

"AAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!"

and then a thrust there

[SHHHLLLOPPPPPP]

"AAAAARRRRRGGGGG!"

and the Deep South maiden of the blade found herself as dismembered as the pets she had kept along with her once-cloaked self, back when one of Rick's number first encountered the nihilistic nomad upon fleeing the farm. Only here the limb loss was slightly varied from before.

"Fighting me is costly, lady," said Billie as she burrowed her sword ever so suddenly now into the chest of her challenger. Church looked at the ground, at the dissected sections of samurai there, and added, "it could run ya an arm and a leg!"

And now Michonne was on the ground owning only her right arm and left leg, life seeping out from the fissure in her sternum.

And those worthy Warriors ever so Sociable and Justiciable were slack-jaw scandalized at the incidence that a member of their number—with not one here, but _two_ protected demographical designations!—could possibly lose a fight. But then they coldly-comforted one another with the fact that it was, at least, not one of those wily white male morons out there who had bested her…and then said righteous, infallible Warriors relented a picoscopic fraction, albeit grudgingly.

VICTOR: BILLIE CHURCH

FATHER GABRIEL STOKES VERSUS ARNOLD LEACH

Topside and several carcass-clustered klicks away, a diametrically-diverse dyad engaged outside the modest villa in which the virtuous portion of this pair had practiced the preponderance of his life's vocation. Yea, it was now at the secluded locale of Saint Sarah's Church that an infernal flying fanatic interfaced with a priest who was packing (but moreso in the firearms department than in the Freudian).

"Your own people have disowned you, and on more than one occasion now," began the bastard of Beelzebub as he bore down on the bald head of his enemy. The aerial anathema had sharpened his talons with incalculable intensity before the match; this would become his bossest butchering since he did in Devin Ross back at Al-Khali—and the beaming bright collar this mook of a monk was wearing only made it all the clearer as to precisely where the abominable leviathan known as Arnold Leach would have to inflict his fatal incision.

For the moment, though, the volant viciousness invested his fervent fury in assailing his opponent with volleys most verbal. He continued, "A shepherd whose sheep have strayed from him from the very first second! You were found cringing out here atop a giant rock…they should have put you out of your misery on sight, and made that crag your cairn."

Father Gabriel said nothing in reply, but merely maintained his stock stance before the carping creature, even his lips still this instant.

"What's wrong, Curate…too panicked to parrot the entirety of Psalm 23?"

Certainly, were Stokes scheduled to confront the geriatric cleric of Jericho, the two might have had themselves down to dueling recitations, who could orate "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death" more effectively and such (though surely none could eclipse effing Coolio on that front).

For now, though, the only prayer upon the depilated pate of the priest was one indeed to the Almighty—but one which simply importuned God to grant that his shots be sure.

And then the once-craven confessor cocked his Winchester Model 70 and, taking aim for a beat through the scope, fired off a round, the propelled projectile

[BLAAAM]

pushing through a Satan-satiny wing of the wayward waste of a soul soaring above him.

"Well, some kind of leader you are, in your downturn from DOW to Dallas, so I've heard."

Such a caustic response from the rector was something the siren of Sheol had never expected. Gabriel's referencing of that terrifying Texan shopping center slaughter, in which the clownfaced cacophony known as Ex-General Arnold Leach had opened up several interdimensional rifts and rendered the lives from hundreds of innocents in the incident. This was the contribution of his condemned coterie, the Dark Rapture, to humanity.

Indeed, there was not a day when this angel of damnation, deep down, did not wish that he could still be with the Department of Occult Warfare, along with the operatives who had joined Jericho.

And now that the Peach State Preach had been delving into such depths, ever so personally with this perversity steeped in perdition, it was time to rip into that sanctimonious collar most riotously.

"I will make a new stole for you out of your own intestinal tract," seethed the subhuman sentinel as he streaked toward the lapsed pacifist of a padre, the latter not quite evading the attack, he catching a talon across the arm, a welling wound telling the tale instantly and for a time thereafter.

Regardless, Gabriel almost kneejerkedly kicked back into his sharpshooter stance and belted off another bullet,

[BLAAAAAMMM]

the shell shocking Leach through his left aileron of evil.

Then it was just as Arnold reared his murderous motley countenance around anew to face his enemy, that the other aimed once more, with word as well as weapon.

"The greatest atrocity you ever committed, Monster…the basest breaking of any Commandment…it was really the Second.

"Though it was not God's name you took in vain…but my patron saint."

[BLLLAAAAAMMMMM]

And with this last report the devil was done in, the beast blasted through the brow into the brain, like the waxen slug that shot through the noggin of Orian in an Irredeemable comics reality.

Seconds after the asshole of an anti-angel collided with the ground, Father Stokes one more time:

"Posing as the Almighty's own Gabriel for the Crusaders centuries back, I mean _really…_

"The only quote I'm gonna recite is the paraphrasing of one of my own flock from back in the day: for acting the part of an Archangel, without the spiritual substance to back it up…

"You'll burn for that."

VICTOR: FATHER GABRIEL STOKES

TO BE CONTINUED


	4. Chapter 4

FIXES FROM THE PYXIS: THE BESTING OF THE BADASSES

By Quillon42

CHAPTER FOUR

MORGAN JONES VERSUS BISHOP MALTHEUS ST. CLAIRE

Now this confrontation occurred in a place that was very sacrosanct, and hallowed, and immaculate, at least to one of the combatants who had been so involved.

Here in this shrine, there was a minister revisiting who recalled the rituals that would transpire, the breaking of bread, the recital of belief and allegiance in a family that was sacred.

It was specifically a man with a staff at his side here, he now who was returning very reluctantly to the residence in King County in which he, his wife Jenny, and his son Duane had made their homestead stand against a perpetual parade of perambulators already perished.

Verily there was no design in the mind of the stick-slinging mofo named Morgan of ever coming back to this property, which regressed over the course of wearying weeks from perfection to perdition in his angst-wracked memory. What was once a bastion against the carrion cantering after them had become a mausoleum for the man, once his lady and lad had been laid into by the unceasing deceased.

Morgan imagined that the contemptible chigger of a child who engineered this tournament had been well aware that this place indeed was the last area on Earth where the man wanted to be.

For now, at any rate, he had to defend against an invader into this home…in an intruder from another country, and, for Paul Monroe Rovian Jesus Christ's sake…another century.

Sleekly the staff of the Southern survivor caressed the crush of the AntiChristian crosier with which the other, evil individual was endowed for this contest. The pair had been flipping sticks at one another for minutes on end now, and it seemed that the jostling Jones was getting the short end of it now, as flagging as he felt and as indefatigable as his adversary had appeared to be.

"Plainly this dwelling reeks of infinite remorse on your part, Moorgan," carped the chastising clergymonster as he rapped his foe across the wrist with the back of his baroque basher. Though Morgan could not quite perceive it in the pronunciation, Maltheus honestly believed that his foe's first name was spelled with two O's, as his skin tone reflected that of the competition during the Crusades.

"I too have been beset with unending hymns of blame by babes who lambast me, blast me for my sacrificing them by having conscripted each into an ill-fated army. I've had hundreds rain down on me, flay me with furious tendrils for my offering them up to the spirit from the other side."

With masochistic gusto this guest from Gehenna absorbed strikes from the contender who contrived to "Clear" all of King County. St. Claire was clobbered in the chest and the neck and the spine…and yet all this brought out from the beatitude-bleating boor was the cruelest of chuckles.

"Surely I have endured the ire of scores upon scores of striplings…but for you, the agony will arrive from the advent of one alone."

[KNOOOCK, KNOOOCK, KNOOOCK] [knock knock knock] [KNOOOCK, KNOOOCK, KNOOOCK]

And then something ever so acidic juked within Jones as he noted the knocking, the three long, the three short, and then the three long again—not an SOS but an OSO, "bear" in Spanish and the family's own code for having to bear all that they have borne so far in these terrifying terrafucked tribulations. It was that telling knock now that gave away the galling reality that soon a certain son would scorch him again, maim Morgan up and down in the man's mind for his failing to foster safety as much as he should have in his home.

At that moment then when

[SLLLAAAMMMMMM]

the baneful boy Duane delved into the depths of that contrition-suffuse kitchen, this warrior of the expired American wilderness could only maintain some semblance of a stance now, the man unable to move or stick, he offering no resistance at all as Maltheus moseyed in and hooked away his staff from his trembling digits.

Unlike other, more oral undead in this author's offerings, this revenant only reviled his father with a serrated stare, the returned teen tearing into his dad with peepers more piercing than any incisors, irises accusing this heretical homey of killing his kin with none other than the utmost of indifference.

"It appears as if there's going to be a reckoning from scion to sire, Moorgan…one of which you have had due you for years now, perhaps."

Then a small coda of clouts to the back of Eastman's final friend as the latter was delivered into the arms of his enraged, unliving-apocalypse-estranged child. Standing over the forlorn figure of his foe now, St. Claire assailing with authority from the evilest on-high: "I'm heartily sorry."

And then

[SLLLMMMMMPPPPPP]

the same ABC™(Abrupt Backswing of the Coolblow) staff strike that Morgan himself perpetrated upon Owen of the Wolves, as well as upon other enemies, all from the on-the-ground camera perspective of said stragglers as the jouncing Jones sent them into oblivion.

Maltheus could only bow his head and offer intentions for his noble opponent as the latter was lashed at by a tongue worse than any tentacles trotted out by the toddlers sent to the Saracens. Hopefully the Pyxis would have pity on the Atlantan apostate when he passed.

VICTOR: BISHOP MALTHEUS ST. CLAIRE

CAROL PELETIER VERSUS FATHER PAUL RAWLINGS

Peculiarly everything seemed to come back into being now, noted the ex-wife/ex-mother/exterminator of the exhaling exhumed as she looked around at her steely surroundings. It was so many seasons ago that the kin-forsaken Carol had cast eyes upon the control chamber of the Center for Disease Control, a place ultimately not unlike the factory of fuckedness that was the semi-industrial-seeming human-termites-teeming compound of Terminus—an alleged shelter that turned out a snare.

Not that the somber scientist in charge of the CDC had really seeking to entrap any travelers (unlike the canny cannibals of the other asylum, turned abbatoir). Dr. Edwin was seeking only to end his time here, and sought to do so without any delays or distractions. There was no hope to be had, given the knowledge he possessed (which soon become common to all countryfolk, in good time) that death indeed was not the end in this world…at least not in terms of some sort of animation of the human husk.

Notably, at any rate, it was Carol—the cowed housewife, the one under so much pressure, even before the Outbreak—it was she who suggested the grenade that would get the survivors sent from the Center and onward. This had been the first instance in which she found a means through munitions, found an answer through ordnance.

And now Carol would have to continue with that line of argument by way of armaments, as she faced off almost showdown-style against a sermoner, high noon against a holy man.

"I can tell this place holds quite some kind of…significance for you," began the preacher, one not featured now on AMC by the name of Stokes or Custer or otherwise, but rather another Southern rectory ranter by the name of Rawlings. "I reckon that I have not before been beneath this roof myself…yet the setting makes me seethe, myself…gets me thinkin' of those I lost long ago."

Father Paul did not elaborate further, but merely gazed around, Al-Khali occurring to him now, as well as that sepia sweetness he once encountered so intimately, then again at such an electronic outpost as this…a woman who became for him a smear of slaughter only moments thereafter.

"Well I think of my loved ones each day, myself…" said the woe-weathered paladin of pain known as Peletier. Then grabbing the Glock numbered 17 at her side and drawing quickly, firing:

[BLAAAMMMMM]

"…but not every damn minute."

Tearingly the shot took the reverend in the right shoulder, rendering him in blistering, bristling discomfort. Carol came forward a pace, measuring Rawlings sprawling back in his swarthy trenchcoat.

Before the quinquagenarian cootie could blast at the blessed bastard anew, however

[BOOOOOOOOOMMM]

a shot issued from inside the jacket of the Jericho, he having fired his Magnum named Faith behind him with his back turned, the bullet breaking through his coat to the body of his opponent (a maneuver which this author completely didn't copy from the end of the Nineties opus _Assassins_ with Sly Stallone), the shot shearing through the thigh of Sophia's militant matriarch, it casting Carol now to the floor.

"You ain't the only cuss what can take a soul by surprise, sister."

Harshly the wily widow gritted against this invective, she allowing Glock of the type 30 to trip down her sleeve and into her raging palm. She let loose with the piece, two slugs striking the ecclesiastic across the arm and the shin, staggering him a spell.

She then hefted the handgun, Madame Peletier primed to pelt Monsignor Rawlings with ever more ammunition, when of a sudden Paul pushed with a desert eagle dubbed Destiny, a weapon with a far greater rating than its mediocrely-received videogame namesake. The discharge from this diminutive devil did in Carol all the more, driving her back further against the unyielding iron partition serving as the skin of the sterile arena.

Peppily the priest then pumped ever closer to his competitor. On the squalid floor, the salty survivor motioned south,

"Oooooohhhhhhhhh…"

moaning as sympathetically as she could, trying to play up pity. All she needed was another itching inch of instants, and she could reach the homegrown MetalGearSolidesque remote control missiles in her trousers… This was, of course, on par with the effing Mega Man arm cannon she basically packed, surreptitiously, against a pickup full of posers in the "East" episode of TWD.

But then before long it was

[BOOOOOOOOOMMM] [BOOOOOOOOOMMM]

from the clever Chaplain as he saw through the ruse and laid the lady to rest with both barrels.

"Ayeppp," the man mused, "Muriel would play possum-aggressive with me like that sometimes. On an odd occasion, it would work with me…then I had gone and caught on before too long."

Rawlings then ratcheted down the eyelids of the only femme still officially left from Season One of the weekly Walkings…but even in this state she could see the shades shimmering around, tormenting her as they did with Rick a mess of matches back.

A female inflection: "You're the one who said those…things would go and eat him up!"

Then a male: "Not so tough now here, are you?" A kitchen knife positioned under her chin, in Carol's mind, making her flinch. "No." Then testing: "Yes?" With finality: "No.

"We Andersons're gonna afford you a fair share of pain for what you wrought upon our little one…others will, as well. Karen and David're looking to drop some cigarettes on your kill floor…bestow upon you a GIFT BASKET OF ASSKICK!"

A pause followed.

The female spirit: "Gift…basket of ass…

"What, Pete?"

Once again the male: "…

"You know…like, Karen and David, like, that store you go to at the mall, with the baskets…"

"… … …No, no, you mean _Harry_ and Dav…look, hon, let _me_ do the talking from here on in."

So the caterwauling conversation continued, all against Carol, ever unabating in its insistency and insanity.

VICTOR: FATHER PAUL RAWLINGS

MAGGIE GREENE VERSUS MURIEL GREEN

Matters were winding down now, or up as it were in this contest, as there were but three more matches to mind, following the instant one that is. Though the immediate opponents here boasted very similar surnames, one couldn't be any more of a contrast to the other.

More particularly, the former, Greene girl hailed from a humble farm—an agricultural origin which the young woman found she was harkening back to most unbelievably and involuntarily now. Maggie hadn't had much exposure to the globe outside of Georgia itself, hadn't really left her home much at all prior to the plague in fact. She had been pretty much as pristine as her property itself for the longest spell…and then fate forced itself into her life, in the form of Rick's revue, to which she tethered herself readily—most especially to that pizza-deliverer turned pioneer and point man Glenn, who'd saved her and supported her through so much strife.

Eventually all Maggie's kin, both by blood and by law, had fallen away from her, and Mister Rhee in fact became the only family surviving…well, him, of course, as well as perhaps a small certain someone whom the both of them baked up between themselves. Yes, hopefully in another nine months or so, a little "GRheene" would get on in the same expansive, wild, deadly environs as his or her parents, and everyone else besides.

Looking forlorn at the foreboding beige barn before her once more, it erected once again after having conflagrated at the close of her first season with these stragglers, Maggie shucked the shotgun her pa Hershel once held, that same Mossberg 500 which could seemingly slug out more shells than an ocean ceaselessly crapping out conches.

With the same dread with which the farmer's fatal femme waited for Carol's decaying daughter to emerge from the same, Maggie now anticipated the exiting of another slight threat from that selfsame storage of silage. She'd heard that her opponent was far removed in origins from her own, and that she'd been far beyond the boundaries of this fuck-flung nation, and even to outposts that escape the borders of the ordinary imagination. Perilously she cocked her scatterer and prepared for the worst, steadied herself for a lady what might be a match for her for once.

Then spilling out of the opening to the pasture's cedar sentinel was what appeared to be someone, or maybe something, brandishing a firearm at the rural roustabout, so she took aim immediately and

[BOOOOOOMMMMMMMMM]

blasted away, her buckshot striking not what was supposed to be her intended target, but rather…some sort of strange beings now, almost effigies made of straw and steel at the same time, the sum of the Scarecrow and the Tin Man if they had ever lain most libidinously with one another.

It was the face of the fright that had made Maggie stir the most. Merely some fine, exquisite fibers it seemed, at first…then upon closer inspection now, she noticed that the hairs on the head of the creation was someone who was close to her…not Beth, or Annette, or Patricia, or Otis, or Jimmy, even Hershel…

"…

"…Lacey?"

[SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSTTTTT]

and then the shrieking shot took the farmer's daughter clean through the chest, cutting her down rather quickly. Even with her heightened awareness and aggression, tempered through hyperfeminist episodes like her confrontations with the obligatorily Chauvinist Gregory in "Knots Untie," as well as her exploits in "The Same Boat" (which was more misandrist than a chapter of an Elena Ferrante novel (but not moreso than a single chapter of such)), she could not with her five normal senses detect the presence of the professional who perfected a sixth most psychic.

"She was shrill, completely deafening in my head just now," uttered the agent who ushered herself out after the dead-decorated decoy preceding her. Maggie could note, her supine figure ever closer to the semi-metallic womannequin that was in this reality her neighbor, in another her sister, in any world a wonderful person who provided a sense of security to the Greene girl that she would not know again till Glenn.

Then the opponent, she marginalized and murdered in her own story, yet standing strong now: "She doesn't blame you, of course. Her spirit's just…jealous a bit, anymore, of those infected yet still alive…and she's horrifically lonely, Maggie.

Dismayed, the heavenly hickette could easily predict her enemy's next line, but Muriel muttered it out just the same:

"Lacey wants you to join her now."

And then

[SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSTTTTT]

with another report from her MG42, which the agent gleaned from a pillbox back in Jericho's World War II sortie (and which emitted laser beams in place of bullets, according to online sources)—Maggie in another second reckoned nothing more, and lay just as much at peace now as the likeness of the lady she beheld.

"Even with a third of her sautéed by laser shot, she still looks better than the floorstain I became back at Al-Khali," mused Muriel, as she stared at the steel body of the simulated Lacey.

VICTOR: MURIEL GREEN

TO BE CONCLUDED


	5. Chapter 5

FIXES FROM THE PYXIS: THE BESTING OF THE BADASSES

By Quillon42

CHAPTER FIVE

NEGAN VERSUS ?

In the main courtyard of the azure-collared-customer's Lego playset that was the Hilltop, a certain monolith of cavemanliness waved about his soulmate of a shillelagh, that crudest of cudgels which was one with his animus.

Pointing the spiky survivorswatter at his opponent, the leather-gussied giant of guano known as Negan came forth, swung with abandon at his enemy for whom, like the brilliant presenters of Kirkman's opus upon AMC, this author would keep the identity anonymous.

[SLAAAMMMMMM]

"You fucking foreigners, you know?"

[SLAAAMMMMMM]

"You think you can just, fuckin'…warp in here, and have your run of the place."

[SLAAAMMMMMM]

"You know that shit's not gonna go down like that, while Lucille and I are all out here, initiatin' another orgy…"

And whoever the fuck it was on the receiving end of the Neganator's violent tirade, he or she or it was far worse off here with Lucy, than Maggie in the previous encounter was with Lacey.

"My team, they were considering having Dwight wield old Lucille here, in my place. Said they couldn't trust me with her."

[SLAAAMMMMMM]

"But you know, I'd feel quite the cuck, watching my lover lay into you by someone else's hand."

[SLAAAMMMMMM]

"Fuck a cuck, cuck a DOODLE DOUCHE!"

[SLAAAMMMMMM]

Honestly for all anyone knew, it could have been one of the treacherous crusaders in service to Bishop Maltheus; or that sadistic Senator Cassius Vicus from the Roman outpost; or any of the Nanna or Inanna or Ninlil or Enlil or Utu or Ki constituents of ancient Sumeria; or effing first-person-prospector Hardcore Henry; or (hopefully, perhaps) Scott Fucking Gimple, for what he wreaked upon millions of violated viewers at the cessation of Season Six, who was the third in this gore-lurid carnage menage.

No one would ever know.

For certain,

[SLAAAMMMMMM]

[SLAAAMMMMMM]

[SLAAAMMMMMM]

once Negan was through with the victim in question, the unrecognizability of same would render the query all the more unanswerable.

VICTOR (BY DEFAULT HERE OR EVEN BY SORT OF FORFEIT): NEGAN

TARA CHAMBLER VERSUS SIMONE COLE

Pityingly the one muffled maiden looked down upon the other, emitting empathy regarding the vibes of suffocation, of all sorts, that the other suffered.

Tara was still amazed at herself, as she holstered her Smith and Wesson Military/Police pistol, that she had come far along enough to be able to take down what appeared to be this otherworldly uberoperative, considering those far removed talents of hers. The shy survivor thought it was all she could do to avoid the erratic bursts of gunfire from her opponent, particularly given that this Corporal Cole seemed to be maneuvering at superhuman speed at times. (In actuality, it hadn't been that Simone was accelerating, but rather was utilizing her ability to manipulate time through an ability called Infinite Loop to slow all the environs that surrounded her).

Regardless of the fact that the shrewd numerologist enjoyed this edge, Simone still couldn't score against Tara enough to emerge victorious in the end. Her X86 Assault Rifle spread its lead all across the apartment in which her foe had lived with her sister Lilly and her father David, and yet not a single shot could make its mark upon any organ vital enough to end her enemy. The confounded corporal didn't want to own up to it, but it had all really been the fact that Tara had earned a point against her at the very beginning, before they even engaged, when she lightly knocked on the soldier's shoulder and briskly wished her good luck.

All of the calculations of possible permutations on the paranormaltrooper's ulnarly onboard computer couldn't quantify the probabilities, to a sufficiently precise certainty, that this mere…Georgian could have possibly have been aware of the jittery Jericho's most pervasive of phobias. To be sure, Simone flew from unflappable to hideously unhinged, should anyone ever lay a single solitary digit upon her algorithm-addled ass without her express consent. In all honesty, it was that first physical exchange from one to the other which had been the decisive contact, the impact that ended the contest between the two of them before the battle had even begun.

Now, in any case, Tara still rubbed at the side of her stomach, where a stray projectile had struck her as she dove to take cover behind her old sofa. She still held a palm absently to her neck, which was also nicked a mite by machinegun fire. The otherwise resilient ranger of the South found at first that the wound had smarted like nothing she'd sustained before…but then of a sudden the agony abated, bit by bit, now all the more intensely that she was standing over the cadet she shot down.

Somewhat pathetically now, in fact, the supine Simone gazed up at the other girl, the former still bleeding from the tear in her sacrum, from the gash in her sternum, from the diminutive chasm in her left cheek carved out from an M&P cartridge. Each in that moment saw in the other's eyes the sentiment of having been smothered, both by an entire team as well as by an overaggressive lover. Neither could breathe the air of arrogance for very long; one endured the probing of the psychiatrist Denise, while the other bore the bluster of the psychic Abigail, and in each relationship the more beta lady was battened down, asphyxiated by the imperiousness of her partner.

There was a certain unspoken kindred feeling of freedom that Tara and Simone alike had felt now, now that each's circumstances had pried her from her paramour. More saliently now, Simone could enjoy aloneness in death, without Abby at her back constantly…and the SafeZonian at her side now knew that look in Cole's eye, had known the tic of release that one felt when freed from something confining, as Tara herself had felt when Glenn assisted her escape from the prison ruins, when the Governor guided her and her older sister out of their apartment when they had been cooped up there for far too long.

As Simone choked up blood while striving with her right hand to reach for her chest wound, her opponent crunched down on her quickly, lifted her palm gently, helped her work that azure aura that would heal and hoist the corporal back onto her feet in the course of another minute. And when Cole was fully functional once again, even improved with her haphephobia (fear of being touched) a bit hampered, it tamped down a touch (literally)…both the woman who won and the lady who lost this base bout would join together, if briefly, to act out their exasperations a bit against the corpses and the cultists, the walkers and the weirdos who had infested the entire postapocalyptic province that had been the Georgia of Rick Grimes's reality.

VICTOR: TARA CHAMBLER

CARL GRIMES, SOPHIA PELETIER, SAM ANDERSON, AND ENID SUCKPERSON VERSUS…THE FIRSTBORN

It was in the same River Camp at which another of the Chamblers had been most dentally savaged—the youngest one Meghan, in fact, whose shooting at the overly histrionic hands of the Governor made for, in this author's opinion, the exact moment in which the entire series had officially gone and capered over the mako—it was in this selfsame space that a small klatch of other kids would start a scrap that would formulate the fate of this already forsaken, dead-deluged sphere.

"There have now been a halved dozen of defeats on each side of the entire competition," began the base babe who was the begetter of this entire brutal brainchild. "Our own confrontation shall decide it.

"Should I emerge the victor, then this entire shell of a hell is mine to claim. I will siphon all the evil and death from the deeps of each ghoul's unsoul, and augment its unenergy to become the ultimate entity of antimatter.

"But should you, in a most unlikely turn, prevail here…"

"Yeah, yeah, we understand just fine," cut in one of the two tykes here whom everyone regretted had ever existed. Carl continued, "We'll just keep on with…"

 _"SIIIIILLLENNNCCCE, BITTTCCCCCHHHHHH!"_

[BOOOOOOOOOOMMMMM]

And then the simultaneously-horrific-and-terrific spectacle of the annoyingest Georgians getting theirs, as not only Enid but also appalling mullet-monster Carl were met with an explosion of the unbreathing all around them, they reaching up from the mud and loam to lay into their flesh unfailingly.

Nearby, Sophia and Sam just sniffed nonchalantly, as just about anyone else would at the unloss.

Nevertheless, an instant following and the two toddlery toughs remaining had now most anxiously raised their piddling pistols at the enemy, Carol's pride and joy packing a Walther P22, Jessie's shame and misery slinging a Ruger SP101.

"You think you can break me with those toys?!" squawked the infernal infant as he cackled all around the two, the creature erecting a most unfair force field to repel the slugs now slamming into its space. "Allow me now _to abort the both of you!"_

Both of the Peach State offspring knew that their guns were no good against the enemy…at least, at the moment. Each was just buying time for the other survivors to assist in the arena…

…with the most secret and supreme of Southern weapons imaginable.

Meanwhile, in any case, a bawdy buffet ensued while certain defunct douches dined upon Enid, chomped upon Carl.

"Man, I guess the bright side of my getting killed in the second season is that I've been exempted from any more of your insufferable ass!" said Dale, as he gulped down one of the hands of Rick's cloying boy.

"He's the whole reason I got off the RV in Season One," agreed Jim, between bites of the child's offending arm.

A few feet away, some of the Saviors who were doomed in the slaughterhouse this past season:

"Hope you don't mind that you're getting the spindly ass legs while I'm all up in the torso," said Michelle to her decomposing compatriot Paula, regarding the eating of Enid.

"Nahhh…really, it's okay…I'm sure I'll _JUST SURVIVE SOMEHOW_ herp derp a derp!"

Reeling back into the rumble itself, the nefarious newborn as it addressed the other two from within its force field, it preparing to belt out a bolt of primordially-prepared concussive force to erase his adversaries:

"Are you ready to cross the breach into unbeing, children?!"

…

 _[DARN, DARN, DAAAAARRRRRNNNNNN]_

…

…

"…

"…What is…

"NOOOOOOOOO!"

 _[DARN, DARN DARN DARN DARN DAAAAAARRRRRRNNNNNN]_

Then alighted the one entity that not even a Biblical baby from beyond could possibly try to thwart:

 _"Mah grits is tha shits 'coz I cain't find my soul…"_

And Sam looked to Sophia and smiled with satiation as each watched their foe fold inwardly at the sound now.

"PLEASE…END MY SUFFERING!"

Gorily the godless thing went and grasped at its ears, wrenching them off abruptly, casting them into the current.

" _Thar's wailin' and woe in the Waffle House this weekend…"_

Yet still the tremendous torment could not cease as the excruciating anthems of "soulful" Southern ballads blared through its brain. The kind that boorishly bookended episodes on and on, like "Blackbird Song" which (allegedly) aurally chronicled Bob Stookey's wanderings in the "Alone" episode of Season Four…the "Up The Wolves" song with Beth Greene and Daryl Dixon in the previous episode "Still" mentioned above in the battle with Xavier Jones…all of these songs synchronized to slay the soul and the very essence otherwise of anyone ever listening to them.

" _Nawlins is bawlins since my peaches're raw and old…"_

"…FUCKING KILL ME!"

Then, with complete presence of mind as to what it was doing, the bastard baby undid its shield, allowing Samphia to push their peashooters straight toward the unholy abomination and, with only such minimal firepower, flush the fetus out,

[BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM BLAM]

send it packing, far past the Pyxis and into an eternity of emptiness and nonexistence…

…where at least there would be silence, the thing muted against the madness of such supposed music.

On the shore of the river, back on Earth, the two tots once cut down far too soon now embraced, each elated with the fact that he or she contributed the most critical blows in the contest when he and she were effaced far too soon in the show's canonical cosmos.

THE WALKING END

AFTERWORD

There was a definitive purpose, a punchline to this entire story I wrote. I didn't just mash up The Walking Dead and Clive Barker's Jericho for the eff of it.

What drives me nuts about characters in science fiction (if not in other genres as well) is the prevalence of the character, oftentimes termed either a "Mary Sue" or a "Marty Stu" (depending on the gender), who is above any kinds of serious flaws, and/or is too cool to lose, like, ever. One thing I like generally about the dynamics of video games in particular is that, per se, the characters are made to lose or die as much as they are made to win or live. In Mortal Kombat, for example, Raiden can win or die, Johnny can win or die, Sonya can win or die. (It almost sounds like the whole "You win or you die" thing that Cersei Lannister says in Game of Thrones, doesn't it…I'm just getting into that franchise actually as of now).

In more hard and fast stories, though, of course, you get these characters who have this much more consistent "cool" in constantly winning ad nauseum, or otherwise coming out on top. In The Walking Dead, I saw this as happening the most with Rick, Daryl, Michonne, Morgan, Maggie, and Carol; this is exactly the reason why I had ALL of them have their asses kicked in this story. And who better to do the job than not only just any video game characters, but the dyingest video game characters around—the ones from Jericho, as they honestly die in-game like every five seconds if you've ever played it. (It's almost as if you could call Barker's first game "The Undying" and then the second one "The Dying" really).

I understand that in something like The Walking Peckerfaces, the stakes are so goddamn high most of the time that the price of loss or failure is often death, such that much of the time, these characters _can't_ lose. I still maintain that there are other, more likeable characters IMO, like Rosita, Sasha, Glenn, Gabriel, and still others who are more likeable because they come off as more vulnerable. As I intimated in the story here, I like Sasha, for example, much more than Michonne, as the latter is too badass-mopey-terminatrixy, while the former shows a vulnerability in, for instance, getting sick with the flu along with many others in Season Four, or enduring a sort of madness in a semblance of civilization in Season Five with Alexandria (to be fair, Michonne goes to the same dinner party in her place in the comics…but Michonne there really just endures a bemused sort of boredom, while Sasha goes completely nuts).

I was actually going to do this same kind of story last year, but instead with X-Men Versus King of Fighters; I just imagined some great fights like Asian Psylocke versus Mai Shiranui, Storm versus Joe Higashi, and Wolverine versus Leona Heidern. And, again, I would have had many badasses getting their bad asses kicked in, and that would have been the punchline; while Kwannon might have won, along with some other characters like Transonic, maybe Longshot, and several others…I would have had Beast lose, and Nightcrawler lose, and Bulshitterine lose, and Gambit lose, and Cable lose, and Kitty lose, and Mystique lose, and Emma lose, and Rogue (GASP!) lose, and Storm (GASPITY GASP!) lose. Because fuck all of them—I think it's incredibly D-Baggy that these characters win more than they draw breath. I don't mean to come off like a huge "hater" or whatever, but I just don't like characters who are "badass," on either side of the gender line.

The bottom line, in fact, is that I think that some of this comes about from the need to empower certain demographics…while I support equality, I support equality as literally as possible. What that means is that everyone can be winners sometimes, but they should also lose sometimes. Honestly, at the risk of sounding like a DBag and all, unless Christians and people of other faiths (or no faith) all lose alike…unless whites and nonwhites all lose alike…males and nonmales all lose alike…we will never have that kind of equality. That is all I'm saying.


End file.
